Keith Smith
Artist’s books and bookworks hold wide appeal for me and are becoming a central focus in my work related to materiality. For PAPR 591: Mixed Media Bookmaking, I created three books, “The Prism of Textual Planes and the Thread of Memory,” “The Alice Drawer,” and “Four Hinges.” The last of these books grew out of my fascination with Keith Smith’s books on bindings. Binding books is an interesting subject to consider since the binding sets order, and order, as we see in books, hypertext, comics, new digital fiction, and bookworks, sets meaning.
My interest in creating “The Alice Drawer” and “The Prism of Textual Planes and the Thread of Memory” is two-fold. First, I want to see the results of attempting to make physical Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality. The idea that one text is shaped by another text, or that a reader will read one text through the filter of multiple texts, is of great relevance to my work in textual remediation and reading maps. Second, I want to engage in the materiality of books as physical objects, and I want to push that materiality until it breaks.
The inspiration for “Four Hinges” grows out of my interest in materiality, but with this book I was not trying to break the limit of a book as a physical object, but rather to directly engage with the physicality of the book. To that end, everything in “Four Hinges” is lush, from the heft and presence of the binding, to the weight of its pages.
The Prism of Textual Planes and the Thread of Memory2009
Cardstock, Paper, Wax, Thread, Text
“The Prism of Textual Planes and the Thread of Memory”
“The Prism of Textual Planes and the Thread of Memory” is a bookwork that plays with the idea of intertextuality. It is a tunnel book. Tunnel books are variations on the traditional accordion structure. They have no spine and, instead, the pages are attached to the front and back covers in accordion folds down their length. Each page is then cut in some manner to allow access to the page behind it. The book thus acts as a tunnel, or diorama, as the reader looks through each page.
I created my tunnel book out of pages taken from online editions of Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the Inferno by Dante, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. My contention is that both Lowry and Lowry’s reader, if she knows these texts, are aware of their intertextual conversations with Under the Volcano. How, then, to make that visually manifest in a bookwork?
In my expression, the book has ten pages. Each page is covered in text but each page also has a circle cut from the center, removing some of the readable text. The circles get smaller as the pages progress backwards toward the end of the book. Thus, page one has almost no readable text and page ten is almost fully readable.
By using the tunnel form I constrain the viewer’s access to the concluding pages of the book, making the narrative doubly obscured. The tunnel form also forces the viewer to look through these texts, making the very act of engagement with the bookwork a search for narrative structure.
When the bookwork is collapsed, the process is both reversed and doubly subverted. The circles fill in, creating what would seem to be a readable text, but they do so from the text of five books, thus making reading impossible.
To create a contrasting sense of connection and closure, the pages of the bookwork are connected with red cotton floss. The threads pierce each page, leading from the outside back of the book, through the texts, until the threads reach the front of the book and spill over the top of the tunnel’s frame, ending in a knot. The threads are sealed with red wax, evoking a connection with official documents and personal letters in ages past.
By forcing the reader to contend with the texts as a whole, as missing pages, and as connected pieces, I hope to create the physical experience of intertextuality.
Regarding the materiality of the book, a tunnel book deconstructs the traditional book form, making it an ideal form from which to explore how far the physicality of a book can be pushed before it ceases to work as intended, and slides into object and metaphor. Tunnel books lack both a spine and a cover, and the resulting lack of support makes holding a tunnel book an awkward and disorienting experience. Tunnel books fail to follow the convention of providing pages for a reader to touch and turn, and often even deny the reader actual text to read, or, as in the case of my example, so disrupts the text that reading is nearly impossible. As an experiment in the boundaries of materiality then, I think “The Prism of Textual Planes and the Thread of Memory” is successful in illustrating how easily the book form can be pushed past its utility.
The Alice Drawer2009
Card Catalog Drawer, Text, Paper, Polyester Sleves, Coin Envelopes, Catalog Records, Altered Book Jackets
"The Alice Drawer"
“The Alice Drawer” is an altered book. Altered books use books as their base material and then re-form them in some way. The range of alterations is extensive. Some artists cut books into different shapes, others use the pages of books to tell new stories, and still others use the pages of books as material for sculptures.
For my altered book, I wanted to re-create a card catalog. Card catalogs began falling out of active use in the late 1980’s. Many libraries ceased the use of card catalogs earlier, but by the mid 1990’s even the strongest advocates had lost the battle to keep card catalogs, and libraries started converting to online systems. Card catalogs were disassembled, the cards themselves were either recycled or archived, and the drawers and cabinets were sold or given away. I purchased a thirty-drawer standing cabinet with reference shelves (the pullout shelf that was used to take notes when searching the catalog) from a local university for ten dollars on the day the library officially closed the card catalog and discarded the cards (they were afraid that if they archived the cards that staff would continue to use them). I used one of the drawers of my card catalog to make “The Alice Drawer.”
Print card catalog records came in triplicate sets - author, title, and subject. Each card had a different filing point so that a book could be found by searching the title, author, or subject (for books with multiple subjects, there were multiple subject cards). The information on the card was constrained by both the size of the card and the standards librarians developed over years of cataloging work. Content was limited to finding and identifying. In “The Alice Drawer” I wanted to re-make the card catalog so that content was expanded to lead and connect, and the usefulness of only finding and identifying was brought into question.
“The Alice Drawer” is filled with cards made out of the materials of a library - the 2010 spring book catalogs of Norton and Harper Collins, two reference books on books, one un-bound manuscript, and five different advanced reading copies. Cards are also made out of two copies of The Complete Jane Austen. Austen’s books create the base text I used to build connections and to lead users to other texts.
While a traditional card catalog would tell a user if a library owned a particular book by Austen, and where it was on a shelf, “The Alice Drawer” leads users to other materials (books, films, audio books) that can be read in relation to Austen, not based solely on subject, but expanded to include a range of connective points.
In my re-conception of a card catalog, the finding elements are deconstructed; so subdivided that their use is lost and their pieces are reduced to being housed in envelopes.
“The Alice Drawer” continues to explore my interests in intertextuality and materiality, even as it comments on library cataloging practices. The first fourth of the card catalog contains cards from The Complete Jane Austen, running in page order. After that, the texts become increasingly interfiled, creating a textual soup in which order is undone, finding is impossible, and reading is pointless. The content, important now, are the cards that lead to connections. In a move that makes both physical and actionable the idea of intertextuality, Austen’s texts become interfiled with the texts of other writers.
The card catalog drawer becomes a new binding for Austen’s works, but ceases to work as bindings are intended. Instead of collecting pages and keeping order, the built-in ease of addition and deletion, designed so that new cards could be added to a drawer and older cards removed, creates the ability to move “pages” around. Where “The Prism of Textual Planes and the Thread of Memory” has a binding, as unhelpful as it may be, “The Alice Drawer” is completely unbound. Its pages are free to be moved and arranged as a user wants, even discarded or archived, as the case may be.
Four Hinges2009
Cardstock, Watercolor Paper, Thread
"Four Hinges"
“Four Hinges” is the most traditionally bound book I have worked on this semester. I am fascinated with the stitching of books and the physical ways they are bound. To that end, I wanted to make a book that was about itself as an object. “Four Hinges” is sewn using an adaptation of the caterpillar stitch, as illustrated in Keith Smith’s Volume III Non-Adhesive Binding - Exposed Spine Sewings.
I used the caterpillar stitch because the binding extended beyond the signatures onto the boards. This extension makes the binding more visible, and integrates the construction of the book into its decoration. I used the watercolor paper to approximate the feel and heft of expensive cotton rag paper. I wanted the signatures to be of significant depth so that their existence would be marked. So often a book’s construction is easily overlooked in the consumption of its content. I wanted this book to be about construction, so the pages are blank and the signatures are thick. I choose the black metallic cardstock to create a strong contrast for the threads, which I wanted to stand out as starkly as possible.
To make the book, I cut eighteen sheets of paper into 5 x 5 inch squares. Each sheet was folded in half and scored with a bone folder before cutting. Three sheets are stacked inside one another to make each signature. The book contains six signatures. Once the signatures were made, I re-cut them as units so that their interleaved pages were the same size (this re-cutting corrects the slight jut caused by the thickness of the paper and ensures that each page is the same size when the book is assembled).
I then cut the covers out of cardstock, making each cover ¼ inch larger than the signature sheets. I made a template to place the sewing holes. The caterpillar stitch requires two rows of holes per binding, so I created a template with eight rows of sewing holes. I used the same template for the signatures. I punched the sewing holes with a large tapestry needle.
The caterpillar stitch uses a double needle sewing method - you begin sewing with one long thread, with a needle threaded at each end. Once the stitch is begun, the needles are treated as if they were on separate threads. It takes two and a half hours to sew each hinge. The stitch weaves down the rows, cleanly spanning on the verso of the cover, but interweaving and backtracking on the front. As each stitch progresses down the cover, towards the spine, it is packed in a process that builds up the body of the caterpillar (by wrapping the sewing thread around previous stitches) and starts the process of delineating the caterpillar’s form. At the start and end of the stitch the threads wrap over the covers, simulating not only the caterpillar’s antenna, but also evoking the locks that use to be built into books.
The stitching continues the same pattern over the spine onto the bottom board. The stitching inside each signature is clearly visible, as small “bites” of thread on the outer signature pages, and as four clear stitches on each of the six center signature pages.
The finished book is a work of contrasts. The covers have a lovely slide to them, while the pages are slightly rough and textured. The thread is bright against the sheen of the metallic black covers and the creamy white pages. The pages are empty. The story here is the way the book is constructed.